At the end of the Easter holidays, 1973, my mother and I went to Harrods to buy the final required item on the clothes list for my new boarding prep school: ‘1 Hymn book: Hymns Ancient and Modern (Standard Edition)’.
My mother forked out for a top-quality one in the books department, in those days when you really could buy anything at Harrods; a year later, we bought our white West Highland terrier there. Though Fingal is long dead, I still have the hymn book: a small, gilt-edged volume bound together with the Book of Common Prayer in black Morocco leather, 1,400 pages long, on India paper so not fat. One morning in that first term, in a fit of loathing and fury just before assembly, the girl I was terrified of tore p.687 of the hymn section almost right off, making a gash down the middle of Hymn 765. I patched it up with Sellotape, now dark yellow and brittle.
Even more traumatically, I once lost the hymn book. You weren’t allowed to lose any item on the clothes list at that school. You had to search all day till you found it. The angelic Georgina Wilson eventually did find it, slipped behind a changing-room locker.
To this day, certain three-digit numbers still have a hymn-y ring to them: ‘228’ means ‘Jerusalem the Golden’, a favourite because we were still hungry after breakfast, and ‘milk and honey blest’ sounded delicious; ‘655’ means ‘I Bind unto Myself Today’, sung to an addictive minor-key tune, with ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’ tucked away between verses 7 and 8; ‘779’ means ‘final hymn in the whole book’, so ‘There was Joy in Heaven’ has a sort of crazy edge-of-the-world feel to it. There’s a yumminess to the cluster 165, 166 and 167: ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’, ‘All People that on Earth Do Dwell’, and ‘O Worship the King’, all in a row, all companions both of each other and of me, for life.
Before I launch into a paean, I must mention that Hymns A & M<
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Subscribe now or Sign inAt the end of the Easter holidays, 1973, my mother and I went to Harrods to buy the final required item on the clothes list for my new boarding prep school: ‘1 Hymn book: Hymns Ancient and Modern (Standard Edition)’.
My mother forked out for a top-quality one in the books department, in those days when you really could buy anything at Harrods; a year later, we bought our white West Highland terrier there. Though Fingal is long dead, I still have the hymn book: a small, gilt-edged volume bound together with the Book of Common Prayer in black Morocco leather, 1,400 pages long, on India paper so not fat. One morning in that first term, in a fit of loathing and fury just before assembly, the girl I was terrified of tore p.687 of the hymn section almost right off, making a gash down the middle of Hymn 765. I patched it up with Sellotape, now dark yellow and brittle. Even more traumatically, I once lost the hymn book. You weren’t allowed to lose any item on the clothes list at that school. You had to search all day till you found it. The angelic Georgina Wilson eventually did find it, slipped behind a changing-room locker. To this day, certain three-digit numbers still have a hymn-y ring to them: ‘228’ means ‘Jerusalem the Golden’, a favourite because we were still hungry after breakfast, and ‘milk and honey blest’ sounded delicious; ‘655’ means ‘I Bind unto Myself Today’, sung to an addictive minor-key tune, with ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’ tucked away between verses 7 and 8; ‘779’ means ‘final hymn in the whole book’, so ‘There was Joy in Heaven’ has a sort of crazy edge-of-the-world feel to it. There’s a yumminess to the cluster 165, 166 and 167: ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’, ‘All People that on Earth Do Dwell’, and ‘O Worship the King’, all in a row, all companions both of each other and of me, for life. Before I launch into a paean, I must mention that Hymns A & M contains hundreds of hymns I’ve never sung, and I bet you haven’t, either. For a quick estimate of how many of its 779 are still well-known, I checked the index and found that a total of 109 of them begin with the vocative particle ‘O’. Of those, I only know twelve. Of this great mass of rhyming Victoriana, many have fallen silent, and rightly so, as they are either morbidly funereal (for example, the one about children in their graves in a churchyard, ‘They do not hear when the great bell/ Is ringing overhead;/ They cannot rise and come to Church/ With us, for they are dead’), or just plain miserable and loaded with inverted commas for scansion’s sake (for example, ‘O’erwhelm’d in depths of woe,/ Upon the tree of scorn’). Looking through Hymns A & M is like being in a vast dusty antique shop full of pieces of obsolete brown furniture, but every now and then a gem shines out. And what precious gems those are! The heartening thing is that, over time, the cream does rise to the top: the hymns still cherished and sung are the best ones, often disarmingly simple, not too wordy or clever-clever, not too pious or self-flagellating. Only this week, at Matins, I was moved to tears singing ‘O Jesus I Have Promised’, the plainness of its lines ‘O let me see Thy footmarks,/ and in them plant mine own’ overwhelming in their directness. That one (271 in Hymns A & M) is by John Ernest Bode, who typifies the kind of author who wrote these hymns and submitted them to the proprietors for publication. Born in 1816, Bode went to Christ Church, Oxford, was a prominent scholar, got ordained, became a rector in Oxfordshire and then Cambridgeshire, wrote hymns, was not and is not famous. If you look up the authors of your favourite hymns, you’ll find that in the main they were written by exactly such obscure divines: Oxbridge-educated clergymen, usually vicars and rectors rather than bishops, who crafted hymns in their study on a quiet weekday. (In those days they didn’t have ten churches to run or risk-assessment forms to fill in.) Steeped in Latin verse, they knew how to keep their lines taut. Living among their parishioners, they were closely in touch with the faith, hopes and fears of ordinary people. The female authors of the book’s hymns (about 10 per cent of the writers of the 1875 edition) tended to be the wives or daughters of clergymen. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall in the train compartment in which Hymns A & M was dreamed up. As a small book called A Hundred Years of Hymns Ancient and Modern (1960) by W. K. Lowther Clarke (one of the hymn book’s twentieth-century proprietors) recounts, one day in the summer of 1858, the Reverend William Denton, vicar of St Bartholomew’s, Cripplegate, was travelling on the Great Western Railway with the Reverend Francis Murray, the rector of Chislehurst. Both had edited their own hymn books, and Denton suggested that their two books, along with another by G. C. White of Margaret Street Chapel, be amalgamated. Murray agreed to ‘look into the matter’, and sought the advice of Sir Henry Baker, vicar of Monkland in Herefordshire, ‘who was engaged in a similar scheme of amalgamating hymn books’. Well, perhaps it wasn’t the most scintillating train conversation ever; but it did kick the whole enterprise off. Something needed to be done about the absurd situation whereby (for example) all five churches in central Nottingham used different hymn books. It was time to create one really good one suitable for all: one that contained not only the treasures of Latin hymnody translated into English, and the best metrical psalms, but also some newly written hymns, with tunes to go with them. A preliminary meeting of the book’s proprietors, who financed the enterprise, was held at the clergy house of St Barnabas, Pimlico; we get a glimpse of the fun to be had at these meetings from a subsequent letter from Baker to Murray: ‘I will promise not to drench you with cider or ginger beer as I did last time.’ An advertisement was placed in the Guardian inviting co-operation. Letters poured in from priests all over the country who had been compiling their own hymn books and were happy to contribute their offerings, often free of charge, for the glory of God. After a few more clerical get-togethers, a sample booklet of 50 hymns was produced in 1859, and the first edition, with 275 hymns plus tunes, was published in 1860. The book was an instant bestseller. Four and a half million copies had been sold by 1868; the hymn numbers climbed as new editions were produced and new hymns added. Between 1860 and 1960, 150 million copies were sold; thus the words of those obscure hymn writers entered the national bloodstream, and still sustain many of us through life. Henry Baker was the single-minded editor who drove it all, working with the musical editor William Henry Monk, a man of impeccable musical taste, who composed ‘Eventide’, the tune to ‘Abide with Me’, in ten minutes one evening after watching the sun set with his wife. As well as being the book’s chief editor, Baker was the author of ‘The King of Love My Shepherd Is’, along with ‘Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven’, ‘Of the Father’s Heart Begotten’, and hundreds of others now forgotten (even the best hymn writers produced reams of mediocre ones). Baker’s dying words, in 1877, were ‘Perverse and foolish oft I strayed,/ And yet in love he sought me,/ And on his shoulder gently laid,/ And home, rejoicing, brought me’, his own beautiful reimagining of the Prodigal Son. That exquisitely consoling hymn is the cream of the cream: no funeral seems to me to be complete without it. ‘Pure Anglican Herefordshire’, carped its critics, and it’s true that in the age of railways and factories, the Victorian hymn writers did rather shun the Industrial Revolution and stuff their hymns with bucolic imagery: shepherds, pastures and streams. But, as Ian Bradley writes in Abide with Me: The World of Victorian Hymns, we don’t actually like modern imagery in our hymns; the hymn ‘God of Concrete, God of Steel’ in 100 Hymns for Today never caught on. What made the best of the newly written Victorian hymns so effective was that they were specifically not by official poets. ‘A good hymn’, wrote Tennyson, ‘is the most difficult thing in the world to write; you have to be both commonplace and poetical.’ It was this tapping into the commonplace, by amateur authors who were ordinary parish priests, that gave the hymns their directness and strength. ‘A hymn’, wrote W. K. Lowther, ‘cannot afford to be recondite and allusive, as a poem may rightly be. The worshipper must not be pulled up by having to ask himself, “what does that mean?”’ Not that the sublimely lovely line ‘Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea’ is exactly commonplace, but it is a charmingly childlike image. ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’, which contains that immortal line, was written by Reginald Heber, a prodigy who was translating Latin classics into English by the age of 7, went to Oxford, became rector of his father’s church near Shrewsbury, and was made a bishop in Calcutta at the very end of his life. I thank him for that serene image, and I thank the Reverend John Bacchus Dykes, the fifth of fourteen children of a bank manager in Hull, for composing the tune ‘Nicaea’ with which it is for ever twinned. Dykes, with admirable selflessness, was determined that his hymn tunes should serve the interest of the words, and he rarely asked for payment. Fifty-six of his tunes were included in the 1875 edition of Hymns A & M, including ‘Melita’, the tune for ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’ – the words for that one having been submitted by the Master of the Quiristers at Winchester College, who’d written it for one of his charges about to sail for America. Both the author and the composer would surely be amazed at that hymn’s lasting success, and indeed its place in the heart of the nation. Some overly complicated theological lines did slip through the net. ‘Bright the vision that delighted/ Once the sight of Judah’s seer’ was gobbledygook to me as a child; my friends thought it meant ‘Judah’s ear’, and I thought it meant ‘Judicea’, as in ‘Boadicea’. Only decades later did I learn that this was a reference to Isaiah’s vision in Isaiah, Chapter 6. As for John Henry Newman’s ‘O generous love! That he who smote/ In man for man the foe,/ The double agony in man/ For man should undergo’: what was all that about? The verse was certainly memorable, and it has been fun spending the whole of adulthood trying to work it out. Victorian critics could be ruthlessly rude about new hymns; as rude as today’s critics are about ‘Shine, Jesus, Shine’. The Church Quarterly Review in 1889 complained that the diction of the new hymns in Hymns A & M was ‘the work of versifiers rather than poets’. The hymnologist Sir Roundell Palmer, who became a Cabinet minister, eloquently put the carpers in their place. ‘A good hymn’, he wrote, ‘should have simplicity, freshness, reality of feeling, a constant elevation of tone, and a rhythm easy and harmonious.’ He was right, but this was much easier said than done. I applaud the hymn writers who achieved it, such as the Reverend Francis Pott, author of the perfect hymn on the subject both of worship and of hymns themselves: ‘Craftsman’s art and music’s measure,/ For thy pleasure,/ All combine.’Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 80 © Ysenda Maxtone Graham 2023
About the contributor
Ysenda Maxtone Graham is the author of three Slightly Foxed titles: Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School, The Real Mrs Miniver and Terms & Conditions. Her new book, Jobs for the Girls: How We Set Out to Work in the Typewriter Age, was published by Little, Brown this September.